My Cosmology

I believe that the only things that exist are the entities that make up physical reality.  I believe that reality consists of the things that are studied by the physical sciences.

So, although I obviously attend church, and call myself a member of a denomination (Episcopalian), and find myself going deeper into the liturgy and traditions and exploring what they mean and what they can bring to me, strictly speaking, I don't believe in God.

At all.  Really don't.  Really, really don't, at all.

Or souls, or Heaven, or a spiritual plane that is separate from physical reality.

I even have trouble with the existence of abstract realms.  I've had some fierce arguments with both Mathematicians and Physicists, because they think they are explorers, mapping out things that actually exist, independently of them, and I know that they are just constructing formal systems, human inventions, games that have certain rules that humans invented and humans can change.  Which is why paradoxes have never bothered me at all.  Just because your formal system breaks down when you think about the barber who shaves everyone but himself, that doesn't mean someone both is and is not out there in reality, it just means your formal system is broken.  And just because an equation tells you something is both a wave and a particle, that doesn't mean that something out there in reality actually is both a wave and a particle, you just need to go back to your drawing board and see where your theory went wrong.

I read recently somewhere that people who are bad at Math also have a more informal attitude about money.  Yep.  Money seems unreal and invented to me, just like numbers do.

So, the project for me is, how do I explain all the things I need to explain about the universe, with only physical building blocks to build them from, or else dismiss them and accept living without them?

That's what this blog is here to explore, as I work out more and more answers to the questions.  But I wanted to make this formal statement about the ground rules, just to get it down in black and white.